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Bench Mark: What I Learned

I wanted to do a quick check-in to log what I learned in my second year of full-time work as an engineer.

My first year was mostly focused around JavaScript, CSS (SASS), HTML5, and getting familiar with some of the tools that support my work (transpiling, compiling, uglifying, module building, browser dev tools, github, Sublime Text).

This year has brought major changes. As my company moves into a microservice architecture and doubles our engineering team, I’ve needed to grow as well. This year I became a part-time nodeJS developer, learning a bunch of the tools that come with that — docker, async unit testing (jasmine), MYSQL queries. I also dabble in PHP when the need arises.

Instead of being a front-end person on a large team, I’m now the only front-end person on a team of 2 engineers, so if I don’t know how to do something, I have to figure it out.

The biggest change is just this feeling of confidence. The number of unknowns has gone down so much that there is no longer a nebulous cloud of questions around every bug. Now I can systematically check through every possibility (environment, settings, versioning, error in current application, error in outside application) to hunt down the root cause.

Interested to see where I’ll be a year from now. I’m reading up to become much proficient with the shell and to keep growing my SQL ninja skills. I’m creating a list for my team of some best practices we can adopt that will make our microservices less cumbersome to test.